Quebec has often struck outsiders as a byword for radicals and
recalcitrance. The French-speaking province sends its own delegates
abroad and calls its legislature the National Assembly. In 1970 a lunatic
fringe agitating for Quebec's secession from Canada murdered a Cabinet
minister, kidnaped a British diplomat, and set off so many explosions,
both verbal and physical, that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked
the War Measures Act, Canada's equivalent of martial law. Even today
the nation's most eccentric voice of disaffection, the nonsensical Rhinoceros...